Manx or no, he’s a good working cat, and since he took up residence in my store I haven’t lost a single volume to mice. It struck me that I owed him a lot. Suppose a mouse had gnawed the spine of Bogey: The Films of Humphrey Bogart, so that I’d had to toss it in the trash or consign it to the three-for-a-buck table? Just as she had walked into my store, so would she have walked on out of it, and I’d have gone on reading Will Durant, as unaware of the whole business as Raffles.

I reached for the phone and called the Poodle Factory, where Carolyn spends her days making dogs beautiful. “Hi,” I told her. “Listen, I’m not going to be able to join you at the Bum Rap tonight. I’ve got a date.”

“That’s funny, Bern. I asked you at lunch if you had anything on for tonight, and you said you didn’t.”

“That was then,” I said.

“And this is now? What happened, Bern?”

“A beautiful woman walked into my store.”

“You’ve got all the luck,” she said. “The only person who walked into my store all afternoon was a fat guy with a saluki. Why do people do that?”

“Walk into your store?”

“Buy inappropriate dogs. He’s bandy-legged and barrel-chested and he’s got an underslung jaw, so what the hell is he doing with a dog built like a fashion model? He ought to have an English bulldog.”

“Maybe you can persuade him to switch.”

“Too late,” she said. “By the time you’ve had the dog for a few days you get attached and you’re stuck with each other. It’s not like human relationships where everything falls apart once you really get to know each other. Bern, this beautiful woman. Is it someone you knew?”

“A perfect stranger,” I said. “She came in for a book.”